Anthropic faces lawsuit over allegedly misleading Claude Max plan claims

A group of Claude users has filed a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the AI company of misleading advertising regarding its top-tier Max subscription plan. According to The Verge, the suit, filed on September 8, claims Anthropic has not clearly disclosed the limitations of the Max plan since its launch in April 2025.

Anthropic markets the Max plan as offering "5x or 20x more usage than the Pro plan," depending on whether a subscriber pays $100 or $200 per month. Claude Pro plans start at $17 per month when billed annually.

Session limits versus weekly limits

The core of the lawsuit is that Anthropic's advertised usage multipliers only apply within a single session window, which resets every five hours. However, Max subscribers are also subject to weekly usage limits, which were introduced only months later, in August of last year. This lawsuit follows an earlier federal case filed by a single Claude subscriber in June.

Confusion over what Claude Max actually offers has also been widely discussed on sites like Reddit, where users have voiced frustration with Anthropic's marketing. One commenter said the interface made them believe they were getting 20 times more weekly usage, rather than a multiplier applied to a session-based limit. Another widely shared Reddit post argued that once weekly caps are factored in, the $200 plan actually delivers only about 1.7 times more usage than the $100 plan, despite promising four times as much and costing twice as much.

Anthropic does disclose the plan's limitations on a support page, last updated August 7, 2026, but Monica Vaca, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, argues the terms are unclear and require users to click through multiple links to understand what the 5x or 20x claims actually mean. Anthropic had not responded to Engadget's request for comment at the time of publication.